Nine Goblins

by T. Kingfisher

  “Graaaah?”

  Finchbones crawled, inch by agonizing inch, toward the girl. He was still clutching the crossbow, perhaps planning to bludgeon her to death if nothing else presented itself.

  John, closest to the source, had gone to his knees. He reached for his sister but she stepped out of the way. Her eyes narrowed, and the voice, if anything, got worse. Nessilka felt as if a mule were kicking her repeatedly between the eyes.

  Our brains are gonna melt. There’s going to be blood coming out of our ears soon. It wasn’t just trampling—those people died of this.

  “Grawww…” said her troll. It fidgeted, crushing her more tightly against its side.

  Nessilka’s vision filmed with red mist.

  Something moved.

  It strode past the fire, past the torches, and even through the film of red, Nessilka thought it moved like a goblin.

  …Blanchett?

  Blanchett was wearing his helmet. He took one more step forward, reached up, and plucked the bear from his helm.

  The voice redoubled. The girl had seen him. It focused, concentrated, and Nessilka began screaming because it drowned the sound out just a little and that was good and anyway, everybody else was screaming, too.

  Blanchett wound up, took two running strides, and flung the bear across the sea of screaming elves.

  It hit the girl square in the face.

  Blanchett always did have good aim.

  The voice ended in a very unmagical squawk. Nessilka considered how long the bear had been in battle—months—and how often it had been washed—never—and just how foul it must be.

  Probably got a lot of Blanchett’s rancid hair gel on there, too. I don’t even want to know what that stuff’s made of.

  Even somebody who’d been surrounded by corpses for a week might draw the line at taking that particular bear to the face.

  Sings-to-Trees yelled in Elvish.

  The troll holding Nessilka dropped her, gently, and lumbered forward. The girl’s face vanished under a large hooved paw.

  “Graw?” it said.

  Sings-to-Trees nodded.

  John stood up. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said, to no one in particular. “I have to take her away. It’s too dangerous. I’ll make a hole.”

  Finchbones coughed, spat, and tried to say something. His vocabulary did not seem to be up to either “summary execution” or “extradition” but John nodded gravely. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said again. “This is bad?—I think?”

  “Yes,” said Sings.

  John nodded again. “Yes. But it’ll be…worse. Much worse. She’s dangerous. I shouldn’t have left her alone. She just…wasn’t this strong before.” He nodded several times, as if cementing this idea firmly in his head. “I’ll have to take her away, sir.”

  “Where will you go?” asked Sings.

  “Somewhere—far. Remote?” John glanced at Sings, then away. “I go there sometimes? It’s safe. There’s nobody there.”

  “That’s probably good,” said Sings.

  “Yes, sir.”

  John paused, closed one eye, and spat blue light. Nessilka cringed in memory of what that blue light could do.

  Finchbones cursed and dropped his crossbow, shaking his fingers. Blue light slithered over the weapon.

  “Very sorry, sir. But she’s my sister.”

  Finchbones said something grim in Elvish to Sings. Nessilka recognized an order when she heard it. Sings said something right back. She didn’t recognize that, but by the tone, Sings wasn’t particularly concerned about following orders.

  He’s a civilian, Finchbones, you can’t court-martial him…much as you might want to…

  John reached up and grabbed the air, as he had once before on the battlefield. Nessilka’s stomach lurched again as he pulled downward, and the air showed… somewhere else.

  It was daylight there. It looked like an alpine meadow. Mountains rose up toward a blue bowl of sky.

  “Excuse me, sir?” said John to the troll.

  “Graw?”

  “Let her go,” said Sings, “and Matthien, you will not shoot one of my trolls or I will raise hell clear to the Great Glade.”

  Finchbones looked as if he’d eaten something extremely sour.

  The troll handed her to John. She gulped a breath and her brother promptly put a hand over her mouth. “Only until we go through,” he told her. “Then you can do whatever you like.”

  He stepped through the hole in the air.

  It hung there for a second longer—long enough to see John release his sister and for her to gaze around with wide eyes—and then the hole closed up and the fabric of the world healed itself.

  A silence fell. It did not break until Finchbones let out a long, disgusted sigh, and picked up his no-longer-glowing crossbow.

  Sings reached down, dusted off the bear, and handed it back to Blanchett.

  “And now,” he said, “I think we’ve all got a lot of talking to do.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Three days later, Nessilka sat in Sings-to-Trees’ kitchen and peeled potatoes.

  Captain Finchbones, much-decorated leader of elite elven rangers, sat next to her and peeled them as well. Sings seemed to feel it would be good for him.

  Finchbones could detach the entire peel in one continuous sweep of the knife, which was very impressive, but Nessilka’s rather cruder technique produced three peeled potatoes for every one of his.

  There was probably some kind of deep philosophical point there, but Nessilka wasn’t inclined to go digging for it.

  It was pretty much all over now. The goblins would leave tomorrow for Goblinhome, and would be provided a ranger escort the entire way. Meanwhile, Finchbones and a small group of his men had been staying with Sings. They pretended they weren’t there as guards and Nessilka pretended her goblins weren’t being guarded, and everyone was reasonably happy.

  Thumper had made a full recovery. So had Blanchett. The bear not only had a set of stripes sewn on his arm, it was possibly the first teddy-bear in history to have received a medal for service to the elven nation.

  Nessilka and Murray had them as well. They were delicate silver leafy things—about what you’d expect from elven medals. She didn’t know how long they’d last in combat, but it had been a nice gesture.

  And…maybe more than a gesture. She glanced over at Finchbones.

  He smiled. “Thinking?”

  “Wondering if this is really going to change anything.”

  Finchbones nodded slowly. His command of the human language had improved somewhat from use, but it still took him a minute to think through a complicated sentence. (Sings-to-Trees had read him the riot act about not speaking the language of people under his protection, and Finchbones, to his credit, was trying. She suspected that his opinion of her had increased radically when she proved more eloquent than he was.)

  “Maybe change,” he said finally. “Don’t know why anything changes. Maybe small thing.”

  Nessilka tossed another potato on the pile.

  “I think things will change,” said Sings. “It’s a good story. People latch onto stories.” He frowned into the soup he was making. “We’ve got to do something, anyway—can you imagine putting that poor soul in the army?”

  Finchbones and Nessilka exchanged glances.

  Best place for him, really, Nessilka thought, if your description’s right. He needed structure and someone to tell him what to do. Pity they didn’t get his sister, too, or those people might still be alive.

  But you couldn’t say that sort of thing to Sings-to-Trees. There was something very…civilian…about Sings. Nessilka concentrated on her potatoes.

  From what they’d been able to piece together—from the old man, and from what Sings had learned from the wizard in the few hours they’d spent together—a picture had emerged. John and Lisabet had indeed been orphans in the village of Elliot’s Cross, until the army had come to recruit John.

  Contrary to Lisabet’s complaints, he had
gone willingly.

  Not like you could draft someone who can simply walk out through a hole in the air…

  Lisabet’s talent had been judged both too weak to recruit—which meant that either someone had been incredibly short-sighted, or she had been too cunning to let anyone know the extent of her abilities, or her powers had increased dramatically. There were all kinds of reasons that could happen, from puberty to stress, and there was just no telling.

  Frankly, they might have thought that dragging everybody toward you, friend or foe, was more trouble than it was worth…

  Now they were on shakier ground, conjecture-wise, but apparently Lisabet had not taken kindly to the people who were taking care of her, and refused to believe that her brother would go off without her. She had presumably decided that the problem was the village, and if everybody in the village was gone, they would have to bring John back to take care of her.

  It was the sort of plan a child would come up with—simple, self-centered, and utterly heartless.

  And there were over forty dead humans and a great many dead animals as a result.

  Nessilka pitched another potato in the pile.

  The rest, of course, was fate. When the Nineteenth had charged the wizard, he had panicked and tried to run. Possibly if they hadn’t all piled through, he might had made it back to Elliot’s Cross, but the shock had been too much and dropped them only partway to the goal.

  We’re probably all lucky we didn’t just vanish in some weird blue space between worlds.

  Finchbones was livid knowing that there was a psychotic wizard on the loose, but they had no leads at all for where the pair might have gone. Nessilka was of the opinion that they had gone very far away indeed. Something about the view through the hole had seemed…remote. Hopefully John could control his sister. Despite having faced him over a battlefield, Nessilka wished him well.

  Someone yanked the door open, and eight goblins piled into Sings-to-Trees’ kitchen. Two elves followed, slightly more decorously…or as decorous as anyone can look with an armful of zucchini.

  “Sarge!”

  “Sarge!”

  “Sarge, the bear says—”

  “Sarge, I get to take Wiggles back to Goblinhome, right?”

  “I’ve been checking our maps, Sarge, against the elven ones, and our route takes us past a couple of human villages—”

  “Sarge, Mishkin hit me!”

  “Mushkin hit me first, Sarge!”

  “I can’t leave Wiggles, Sarge! He’ll pine!”

  “—and I was hoping we might be able to purchase a couple of lenses for the looky-tube thing—”

  “He took my zucchini!”

  “It was my zucchini first!”

  Nessilka put her hand over her eyes. Finchbones grinned down at the potatoes. Weasel hooked her finger into the raccoon’s cage and stroked the top of its head.

  She dealt with things in order of importance. “Wiggles goes with us. No kitten left behind. Murray, we’ll see how it goes. Blanchett, have the bear prepare a full report after dinner. Mishkin, Mushkin, I don’t care who started it, it’s my zucchini now, and you will both be washing dishes after dinner!”

  She drew a deep breath, and delivered the final and inevitable coda. “Gloober, get your finger out of there!”

  “Awww….”

  Well, at least things were getting back to normal. And maybe nothing would change, and the war would still go on, and they’d be right back to gruel and marching up hillsides in the dark.

  Maybe Finchbones was right, and you never knew why anything changed. Maybe it was all down to small things.

  Like teddy-bears. And kittens.

  And goblins.

  ###

  About the Author

  T. Kingfisher is the pen name for Ursula Vernon, author and illustrator of the Hugo Award-winning graphic novel “Digger” and creator of various children’s books.

  She lives in North Carolina with her husband, garden, and defective pets. You can find out more about her life than you will be comfortable knowing at www.redwombatstudio.com